Leadership is often treated like a badge that appears after a promotion, a funding announcement, or a new title on LinkedIn. In reality, it behaves far more like a skill sport. You do not become a better leader simply by surviving another quarter or managing more headcount. You improve by getting very specific about the behaviours you want to strengthen, turning your daily work into deliberate practice, and building feedback loops that sharpen your judgment. For most founders and managers, the challenge is not motivation. The challenge is that their days are already flooded with tasks, fires, and shifting priorities. In that chaos, leadership becomes reactive. You respond to whatever crisis appears in front of you and tell yourself that you will work on being a better leader when things are calmer. That calmer future rarely arrives. If you want to practice and improve your leadership skills, you have to use the reality you already have, not the ideal version you might get someday.
The first step is to decide what kind of leader you are actually trying to become. Many people say they want to be a better leader, but when pressed for what that means in concrete terms, they offer vague traits such as inspiring, strategic, or empathetic. Those words sound impressive, but they do not translate into daily actions. A more useful approach is to anchor your leadership development in the real transitions you are facing over the next twelve to eighteen months. Perhaps you are moving from being the individual builder who ships most of the product to someone who must now scale and guide a small engineering team. Maybe you are shifting from doing all the selling yourself to leading a small sales team and building a repeatable process. Perhaps your organisation needs to move away from chaos and heroics toward basic planning, predictable delivery, and less rework.
Each of these transitions demands specific leadership behaviours, not generic adjectives. It helps to write down three concrete capabilities you need, phrased as actions. You might say, for example, that you need to run meetings that end with clear decisions and owners. You might decide that you must become better at giving feedback in a way that changes behaviour without crushing morale. You may recognise that you need to set priorities that your team can actually follow for more than a week at a time. When you define leadership in terms of these outcomes, you stop chasing a fuzzy ideal and start training for clear operational results. You are no longer trying to become a generic great leader. You are training for the kind of leadership your company needs from you right now.
Once you know what you are training for, your calendar becomes your gym. Every founder already has a set of recurring situations that demand leadership: weekly team meetings, one to one conversations with direct reports, customer calls, sprint planning, pipeline reviews, investor updates. Instead of seeing these as obligations you must endure, you can treat each one as a place to practice a specific behaviour. The key is to keep your focus narrow. One meeting, one skill. In your weekly team meeting, for instance, you might decide that your practice goal is to end with three clearly articulated decisions, each with one owner and a deadline. In your one to ones, you might set an intention to ask at least two open questions before offering any advice. On customer calls, you might commit to letting the team member lead most of the conversation while you step in only to clarify or unblock.
Writing these micro goals down at the beginning of the day takes only a few minutes, but it fundamentally shifts your posture. You are no longer just showing up to get through your schedule. You are stepping into each interaction with a small, deliberate experiment in mind. Over time, these experiments accumulate into real skill. You get better at structuring meetings, asking questions that reveal what is really going on, and creating space for others to step up. The work you had to do anyway becomes structured practice instead of a blur of activity.
Alongside behaviour in meetings, your judgment is another core leadership muscle, and it can be trained with surprising speed if you stop treating decisions as isolated events. A simple decision log can change the way you learn from your own choices. This does not require a complicated tool. A shared document or basic note is enough. For every meaningful decision, you record what you chose, what alternative you rejected, what information you had, what risk you accepted, and over what time frame you expected to see the outcome. Writing these points down usually takes no more than a few minutes, but it creates a trail of your thinking.
If you review this log every couple of weeks with a cofounder or trusted senior colleague, patterns begin to emerge. You may notice that you consistently underestimate how long projects will take to complete. You may see that you commit to pricing decisions without enough customer data, or that you avoid making difficult calls about underperformers until the situation becomes urgent. The aim is not to punish yourself. The aim is to turn vague feelings into visible patterns you can design around. When you understand your tendencies, you can put guardrails in place. For certain kinds of decisions, you can slow down and involve another person with a different risk profile. For others, you can define clear criteria before discussion begins. This is what mature leadership judgment looks like in practice: not perfection, but conscious design.
Improvement also depends heavily on feedback, and here many leaders handicap themselves. The feedback they receive tends to be too soft or too vague to drive change. People say that things are fine, or that the team is a bit confused, and then nothing happens. You can create more useful feedback loops with a few simple habits. One is to build a standing question into your one to ones with direct reports, such as asking what you should stop doing as a manager this month. By treating this as normal rather than dramatic, you give your team permission to speak. Your job in that moment is not to argue or justify. It is to listen, take notes, and look for recurring themes.
Another tool is to run quick pulse checks after important meetings, such as leadership sessions or all hands. A short form with two questions about clarity of decisions and clarity of expectations is often enough. You are not trying to measure popularity. You are trying to measure whether people walked away knowing what was decided and what is expected of them. A third feedback channel comes from peers who see you under pressure: a cofounder, a product lead, or a senior engineer. Asking them to point out where your actions helped move work forward and where they slowed progress gives you a view that is different from your direct reports. For any of this to matter, feedback must lead to visible changes. When you choose one or two behaviours to work on, name them explicitly to your team. You might say that you have heard their comments about interrupting discussions too quickly, and that you are experimenting with speaking later in the conversation. You can even invite them to call it out in the moment. This kind of public practice is uncomfortable, but it accelerates growth.
Another dimension of leadership practice involves expanding your range. Every founder has a default mode shaped by their history. Some lean heavily on command and control, making fast unilateral decisions and expecting quick execution. Others gravitate toward consensus, seeking broad agreement before moving forward. Some prefer a coaching style, focusing on questions and development. Your default style likely helped you survive the early chaotic phase of your company, which is why it feels natural. The risk is that you overuse it even when the context demands something else. Improving as a leader does not mean abandoning your natural strengths. It means adding new gears.
You can experiment with range by deliberately choosing situations where you will try a different stance. If you typically decide everything yourself, you might pick one decision this week where you simply facilitate the conversation and allow the team to choose a path within clear guardrails. If you usually chase consensus, you might identify a decision where you will set a clear direction, explain your reasoning, invite questions, and then move ahead without waiting for full agreement. After each experiment, reflect briefly on what happened, how the team reacted, and what you would adjust next time. Over time, you will build a mental map of which style fits which context. High pressure crises with limited time may legitimately require a more directive approach. Longer term product or culture decisions may benefit from a more collaborative or coaching stance. The outcome you want is to stop leading on autopilot and to start making intentional choices about how you show up.
Of course, all of this depends on building habits that survive the worst weeks, not just the calm ones. Many leaders begin with good intentions. They start journalling decisions, running better meetings, and asking for feedback. Then a big customer threatens to churn, an investor visit looms, or something demanding happens in their personal life. The carefully crafted routines collapse. This is often a sign that the routines were too heavy. Any leadership practice that only works in ideal conditions is not a real system. To make your practice durable, you can stress test it in your mind. Ask what would still be possible in a week where almost everything goes wrong. Perhaps you cannot maintain a full daily reflection, but you can still log the three most important decisions of the week. Perhaps the longer feedback questionnaire disappears, but you can still ask one question at the end of each one to one. Perhaps a long planning session gets cancelled, but you can still end every meeting by summarising what was decided and who is responsible.
When you reduce your routines down to their smallest effective version and tie them to existing habits, they become much more resilient. You can attach your decision review to a specific time every second Friday after standup. You can write your leadership focus for the week every Sunday evening. You can reserve the last five minutes of every one to one for feedback. The smaller and more anchored the habit, the more likely it is to survive chaos, and that is where real compounding happens. Improvement does not come from perfect weeks. It comes from small practices that continue even when you are tired or under pressure.
Perhaps the most powerful shift of all is to treat your leadership the way you treat your product. When you build product, you do not expect every feature to be perfect on the first release. You ship, you measure, you listen, and you iterate. Some ideas fail. Others surprise you by working better than expected. You do not take a failed experiment as proof that you should stop building. You adjust and try again. If you approach leadership the same way, you free yourself from the fear of getting everything right at once. A meeting format that falls flat is just a data point. You can change the structure next time. A difficult feedback conversation that goes badly becomes a prompt to refine your language and timing. A change in role design that stalls progress leads you to revisit the responsibilities and support, not simply to blame the individual.
This product mindset removes ego from the process. Your identity is not tied to being flawless. Your value lies in building a team that can see reality honestly, adapt quickly, and keep shipping. Under that lens, leadership is no longer a mysterious quality that some people simply possess. It becomes a set of behaviours and systems that you can observe, refine, and improve over time. You already have the raw material for this practice in your schedule, your decisions, and your interactions. The choice in front of you is whether you allow them to pass by as a blur of obligations, or whether you claim them as deliberate training. If you choose the latter, you will discover that the most meaningful leadership growth does not come from grand gestures, but from quiet, repeated acts of attention to how you show up every day.
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